today a.m. approximately 7: 50 a.m.
Location President & Eastern Ave.
I may have this on video. GoPro helmet camera.
I have already spoken with the BCPD.
Rider suffered head injury, how severe I do not know.
Hopkins Launches Public Safety Installation
By Ron Cassie, Baltimore Magazine
Beginning this morning, 3,000 pairs of shoes will be affixed to the fence around Johns Hopkins-owned property at the corner of St. Paul and 33rd Streets by members of the JHU community. The project, conceived earlier this spring, is designed to highlight safety issues faced by pedestrians and bicyclists.
Specifically, the 3,000 pairs of shoes represent the number of pedestrians and cyclists involved in motor vehicle crashes in the state of Maryland every year, according to Hopkins’ Office of Alumni Relations, which notes that more than 100 people die in the state each from such crashes.
…
Baltimore #2 (for worst drivers) :(
Once again Allstate studied the auto insurance claims frequency of America’s 200 largest cities and ranked Baltimore the second worst with an 87.9% likelihood a motorist living there is to be involved in a crash, relative to the national average.
Ref: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2012/08/28/cities-with-the-worst-drivers-2012/
Flashmob Creates Instant Human Crosswalks (Video)
B’ Spokes: I am a big fan of this type of activism, no crosswalk? Well bring your own.
https://www.treehugger.com/cars/fighting-car-culture-instant-human-crosswalks-video.html
Cutting dependence on cars isn’t anti-car, it’s common sense
Excellent post by Herb Caudill, Greater Greater Washington though I think he misses a few points. Any mode of transportation that is better accommodated then other modes gets… well crowded. New York City subway and pedestrian malls for one example… and we all know the results when only cars are accommodated. The trick I think is to try and balance the different modes, in particular denser development *needs* denser modes of travel then what the automobile alone can provide. Congestion? We need to think first about getting mass transit and bike accommodations in there and only after that think about expanded capacity of the roads. The goal is to move more people per square foot of land use, not have each additional person "consume" a hundred times their floor space just for a car. Now for a few quotes:
****************************************************************************************************
…
The central fact about cars, from a planner’s perspective, is that they take up space. Lots of space. And this matters because space in cities (a.k.a real estate) is scarce and therefore expensive.
Cars take up space when they’re moving and they take up space when they’re parked, and even though they can’t be simultaneously moving and parked, you have to plan for both states and plan for peak demand; so you have to set aside some multiple of the real estate actually occupied by the car at any given time.
…
In the past, our policy response has been to just set aside more and more space for cars: More freeways, more roads, more lanes on existing roads, more parking garages and surface lots. This approach hasn’t worked, and there are two very practical reasons why:
…
Read the rest here: https://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=16000
Dukakis To Transportation Nation: You Were “Dead Wrong” on Romney and Infrastructure
“You were dead wrong. When Romney left the governorship, the state was a wreck– rusting bridges, potholed roads, a great transit system that had serious financial problems he refused to fix, and a pathetic inability to get anything done. Projects that should have taken months took years, and his ” fix it first” program was a joke.”
https://transportationnation.org/2012/08/20/dukakis-hits-romney/
Update:
To be fair I found this positive spin:
"Still, Romney’s resistance to building lots of new transit infrastructure may be an indicator of exactly the kind of fix-it-first mentality he’s known for — and a sign that crumbling infrastructure was, indeed, a major concern of his. After all, Boston has the oldest transit system in the country, with badly deteriorating infrastructure. Former Boston transportation official Ted Brown says it was “admirable ” that Romney gave capital projects a back seat to focus on maintenance."
https://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/09/05/fact-checking-deval-patricks-attack-on-romneys-transpo-record/
New Study Shows Higher Midlife Fitness is Key to Healthier Aging
DALLAS (Aug. 27, 2012) — A new study from The Cooper Institute in collaboration with UT Southwestern Medical Center, shows that individuals who are fit at midlife have fewer chronic diseases in their Medicare years and spend less time with these diseases. The study, published this month in The Archives of Internal Medicine, is one of the first to look at the relationship between fitness and the burden of chronic illnesses in aging.
…
Results showed that higher midlife fitness was strongly associated with fewer chronic conditions in later life. “What sets this study apart is that it focuses on the relationship between midlife fitness and quality of life in later years. By that I mean, fitter individuals aged well with fewer chronic illnesses to impact their quality of life,” says Willis. Those people in the study who were fitter had a lower burden of chronic conditions such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease and certain cancers.
Another unique finding of the study was that even among those participants who had died during the study, the fittest spent less time in their final years burdened with chronic health conditions. “We’ve determined that being fit is not just delaying the inevitable, but it is actually lowering the onset of chronic disease in the final years of life," said Berry, senior author of the study.
“This research illustrates perfectly what we’ve been practicing for over 40 years. A healthy and fit lifestyle allows us to square off the curve,” says Kenneth H. Cooper, MD, MPH, Founder and Chairman of Cooper Aerobics. “That means we want people to spend most of their lives in good health with an active lifestyle and less time with a chronic disease.”
https://www.cooperinstitute.org/pub/news.cfm?id=134
Blue Moon Celebration- Nature Art In The Park
[B’ Spokes: Something to bike to or just enjoy the outdoors.]
To join via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/476801212332850/
The problem: Bikes Colliding with Buses
B’ Spokes: I am very concerned about how this cycling accident is being reported here. Previous experience with the Jack Yates and Nathan Krasnopoler fatalities has shown that police were very quick to put the blame on the cyclist and all initial reports said "the cyclist hit the motor vehicle" so the police found/made up something to justify their position that the cyclist was at fault, totally in error. And I will assert that if it were not for the involvement of the cycling community justice would not have been served.
Questionable quotes from the article: https://www.wbaltv.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/Owner-of-Nacho-Mama-s-dies-in-Ocean-City-collision/-/10131532/16265034/-/522nxc/-/index.html
* the bike he was riding collided with a bus
* Emergency personnel determined that a bicycle being operated by an adult male impacted a city bus that was traveling in the northbound bus lane.
. [Note: As far as I am aware this is a bus/bike lane, not a bus only lane.]
So unless we have some evidence that the cyclists was traveling against traffic the reporting is highly suspect.
Continue reading “The problem: Bikes Colliding with Buses”
Spectacular New Floating Cycle Roundabout
B’ Spokes: This is an amazing way to accommodate cyclists at a busy intersection. The bad news is that it is in Eindhoven, Netherlands… so it make take decades before the USA does anything similar.
More info, pictures and a video of the Grand Opening: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/spectacular-new-floating-cycle-roundabout/